Officials ask for patience as Maui residents question response

OLOWALU, Maui, Hawaii - With the death toll from the Maui wildfires at 93 and expected to rise, search crews continued to scour the scorched ruins Sunday and officials pleaded for patience as they struggle to recover human remains from ashy wreckage that disintegrates when stepped on or touched.

Just two of the victims so far confirmed killed in an inferno Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said “melted metal” had been identified by Saturday night. Search teams had covered only 3 percent of the disaster zone, in part because surviving structures are unstable and dogs sniffing out the area need breaks, Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

“They have gridded out the area. They use the dogs and they have the teams that go in there. But it’s hot. The ground still has hot spots,” Criswell said, adding that more search-and-rescue dog teams are being deployed. She likened Lahaina’s waterfront, lined with the burned shells of cars, to “a scene from an apocalyptic movie.”

Officials urged relatives of the missing, whose names and photos fill walls at shelters and spreadsheets circulating online, to submit DNA to assist with the identification process in the aftermath of what has become the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

“Every one of those [victims] are John and Jane Does,” Pelletier said. “We know we have got to go quick, but we have got to do it right.”

The pace of the search contributed to frustration among Maui residents already angered by local authorities’ failure to activate warning sirens as the blaze sped toward Lahaina last week and a sense that official relief efforts have been sluggish. Across West Maui, people have banded together to provide shelter, food, fuel and other resources for those left homeless by the inferno.

[Tourists are urged to avoid Maui as hotels prepare to take in evacuees and first responders]

Other questions remain, such as what sparked the wildfires and why warnings and mitigation steps - such as preemptively shutting off power to prevent downed power lines amid powerful winds known to increase fire risk - weren’t followed.

While wildfires take place every year on the islands - the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization estimates that 0.5 percent of Hawaii’s total land area burns each year - none have burned so much so quickly.

The death toll of the Maui wildfires quickly topped the 2018 Camp Fire in California, which killed 85. But in California, it took 17 days for the fire centered in the town of Paradise to destroy 14,000 residences over an area the size of Chicago. The fire in Lahaina started slowly but then ripped through town in a matter of hours - with the final death toll still unknown.

Officials have pushed back on criticisms of being unprepared, characterizing the response as deliberate in a hazardous environment. FEMA said Sunday it had deployed more than 250 of its employees, including 45 disaster survivor assistance staffers who are visiting shelters to help residents apply for financial aid.

The National Guard, which said it had activated 134 troops to assist with the response, expects an additional 200 staff members to arrive in the coming days, FEMA said Sunday.

“I can understand why there is frustration because, as I said, we are in a period of shock and loss,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said Sunday on CNN. “From what I can see, the government agencies are there.”

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D) said National Guard members could help open roads, easing travel and supply deliveries. In the days after the fire, many residents and businesses transported aid to Lahaina by boat and water scooters. On Friday, however, the U.S. Coast Guard said it was restricting access by any unapproved vessels to about 10 miles of coastline around Lahaina, citing danger to the public and coral-damaging pollution.

Some Lahaina residents who have found a way back to check property damage are describing and documenting a harsh reality: the sight of authorities still recovering bodies, carcasses of dogs and cats strewn about, and other horrors.

Tyler Olsen, a 27-year-old Salt Lake City native, said he and his girlfriend were among the first evacuees to enter a now tightly restricted disaster zone. They were both curious and desperate to find out what happened to his apartment building and his business, a gym, after the couple had escaped the flames.

The gym survived, Olsen said. The apartment building was no more. Then came what they found in the historic district in Lahaina.

“It was way worse than I could ever imagine - ever,” he said. “When we walked in there it looked like bombs had gone off.”

Officials have limited residents’ access to the most affected areas of Lahaina, which they said contained toxic materials and perilous structures. In a statement, Maui County instructed people in fire-affected areas to drink bottled water only and avoid tap water, which it said may contain contaminants. Maui County Mayor Richard T. Bissen said Lahaina was too hazardous to explore and its contents too sensitive to disturb.

“We’re not doing anybody any favors by letting them back in there quickly, just so they can get sick,” Bissen said. “We’re asking for the respect and dignity of recovering anyone who is still there.”

Hawaii’s attorney general late Friday announced a probe into the decision-making and policies surrounding the Maui fires, including county authorities’ failure to sound sirens that could have alerted Lahaina residents. The risk was known: Wildfire researchers had warned for years, including in a report prepared for the county in 2020, that West Maui was highly susceptible to such conflagrations.

Rep. Jill N. Tokuda (D-Hawaii) suggested the alerts might not have helped as much as some think. Speaking Sunday on “Face the Nation,” Tokuda said if residents heard the siren, they “would not know what the crisis was.”

“You might think it’s a tsunami, by the way, which is our first instinct. You would run towards land, which in this case would be towards fire,” she said.

Tokuda, whose district includes Lahaina, surveyed the damage on Saturday and described “fires smoldering in the distance” and “cars literally melted into puddles that have hardened over on the road.”

The congresswoman framed the wildfires on Maui as crises caused in part by climate change and underscored the importance of aid from FEMA, which has estimated reconstruction costs on the island to be about $6 billion.

Most of the more than 2,200 structures destroyed by the Maui fires were residential, leaving thousands of people without shelter. Green, Hawaii’s governor, said Saturday that housing and homelessness were “a top priority.”

A housing task force had secured 1,000 hotel rooms, Green said, half of which would immediately go to displaced residents, and half to recovery support workers, at least initially. Some of the island’s many short-term vacation rentals are also being converted to long-term rentals to house evacuees, he said. The costs will be covered by the state, FEMA and charities, he said.

The idea is to place affected “residents into hotels so the hotels themselves can stay open,” providing shelter while lessening the economic blow from the fires, Green said.

Some of the destroyed or damaged structures were probably never permitted or insured, Green said. An insurance commissioner will be working on Maui with his team starting Tuesday to speed compensation for insured fire victims, Green said. He added: “[For] those who don’t have any other benefits, the state does intend to be extremely generous.”

Thousands of migrants from Pacific island countries live and work in Hawaii through treaties signed with the United States, collectively known as the Compacts of Free Association. Many of them live with extended family in structures with limited or no insurance coverage, according to Hawaii’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

Green noted that Hawaii has long dealt with wildfires. But he said the deadly Maui blaze, driven by hurricane winds and dry terrain, was the result of a never-before-seen confluence of climate conditions.

“There is no question this catastrophe is going to change the way everyone looks at fires across the globe,” Green said.

Cho reported from Seoul; Brulliard from Boulder, Colo.; and Timsit from London. The Washington Post’s Lyric Li in Seoul; Ben Brasch in Atlanta; and Ariana Eunjung Cha, Anumita Kaur, Mariana Alfaro and Paulina Villegas in Washington contributed to this report.